‘Call of Duty: Ghosts,’ ‘Watch Dogs’ require a beast of a computer

With a new generation of consoles only a month and some change away, it only makes sense that games that are on consoles headed for the PC will have some hefty hardware requirements. With Call of Duty: Ghosts, and Watch Dogs, though, “hefty” is hardly the word I’d use.

Both games require six gigabytes of system RAM. Six. To put that in comparison, last year’s Call of Duty: Black Ops II only required two gigabytes to run. Both games will also require a 64-bit version of Windows to run (which you should have anyway). It’s nice to see applications finally written natively for 64-bit, ten years after mainstream acceptance of 64-bit processors. Both Watch Dogs and Call of Duty: Ghosts will also require a graphics card capable of DirectX 11 and a gigabyte of VRAM. No DirectX 9 support this time around for Call of Duty. However, Ghosts also requires 50 gigabytes of free hard drive space. Thankfully, Watch Dogs requires only 20 free gigabytes.

What is going on with these requirements? Either these games are going to boast very high resolution textures, or they will be horribly optimized for the platform. You can check out the full list of requirements and recommended specs forCall of Duty: Ghosts and Watch Dogsfor yourself.